{"id":689,"date":"2005-01-17T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2005-01-17T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:58","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:58","slug":"perles_before_s_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=689","title":{"rendered":"Perles* Before Swine"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d written James Wolcott off already as silly – I mean what can you possibly say about someone who says things like “I will be as civil as I can be with a knife permanently wedged between my teeth<\/i>“<\/a> and leaves you wondering exactly which pattern of Christofle butter knife it might be?<\/p>\n

Wolcott says “that this whole business about pessimism versus optimism is, well, silly.<\/i>” Which is, in fact, silly.<\/p>\n

But I forget that as a journalist, he’s probably never been a leader. I have an acquaintance in Big Journalism in New York – her brother is a dear friend of mine, and my sons have been backpacking with her son.<\/p>\n

I gather from their experience that the denizens of Gramercy Park don’t lead scout troops, they hire it out. Because had Mr. Wolcott led even a group of Brownies on a hike around Central Park, he’d realize the difference optimism and pessimism have on actually motivating people to get things done.<\/p>\n

Here’s what I said once about optimism:<\/p>\n

For someone who doesn’t go to church (except once in a while to hear my sweetie sing), I do seem to talk a lot about faith. I do because I believe that on a fundamental level, it is the intangible that really drives people; it is their faith in the future and each other that makes them willing to step up and shoulder burdens, take risks, accept loss, to move out of present comfort into pain in order to move to a future about which we can’t be certain.<\/p>\n

\n…<\/b><\/p>\n

\n…some of the critical things I’ve said about Bush; specifically that he hasn’t articulated or sold his plan. I think it is necessary that he do so, because ultimately this war will be won by the side with the stronger faith; we are matching our faith in our vision of the future against our opponents’.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Undue pessimism and unsupported optimism are, in fact the furthest thing from silly. They are dangerous and deadly serious. But as I said, you’d have to live somewhere except Manhattan to understand that.<\/p>\n

\n*Perles is the Christofle pattern from my former wedding<\/i> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Undue pessimism and unsupported optimism are the furthest thing from silly. They are dangerous and deadly serious. But you’d have to live somewhere except Manhattan to understand that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}